Eclectic and striving never to follow paths into ruts, the OF Blog focuses on essays, reviews, interviews, and other odds and ends that might be of interest to fans of both literary and speculative fiction. Now with a cute owl for your enjoyment.

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Was a bit too busy yesterday to post #11-20, so I decided to combine it all together for the final 20 of 2014. Appropriate anyways, as it would have been very difficult to decide which belonged in which subgroup of ten. The differences between #1 and #20 are miniscule, as each of these are excellent works, featuring many new writers. Hope some of these works will lead to you considering reading them.

Winner of the 2014 Prix Goncourt, this novel mixes personal recollection
of the author's mother's experiences during the Spanish Civil War with
the change in French writer George Bernanos's views on the war to create
a powerful story of loss and suffering in the midst of a cruel and
devastating war.

Finally released in translation in the US, this 1949 novella by one of
Israel's founding fighters/politicians is one of the most harrowing and
damning accounts of the eviction of the Palestinians following the
1948-1949 war that established the state of Israel.

In prose, poetry, and play genres, Grossman explores the loss of his son
during one of the rocket attacks in northern Israel during the 2006
mini-conflict with Hezbollah. Powerful, sad, and so much more.

Finalist for the 2014 National Book Award, this novel about a Lebanese woman and her abandoned translations of some of the world's greatest literature speaks volumes about why some do give up or go in directions their hearts would rather not travel.

Winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize, this novel in some sense could be seen as an Australian version of the non-fiction Unbroken in its treatment of WWII prisoners and the humanity discovered even within the worst abuses against human beings.

This National Book Award winning collection is my favorite book of the year for its combination of humor, rage, frustration, doubt, and all the gamut of human emotions in these tales of Iraqi War veterans dealing with their experiences, both wartime and after. Just an outstanding debut and a well-deserving winner of the National Book Award.

2014 was a good year for debut novelists. Out of the 26 debut novels/collections that I read this year, 12 made my Top 50 releases of 2014 list, with 6 in the Top 20 (to be posted shortly). Here they are, with brief descriptions:

Tales involving lovers separated by time and space by all rights should be trite and clichéd affairs. How many ways can a writer express "true love" without it becoming hackneyed and devoid of anything resembling originality? Yet every now and then, there emerges a writer who manages to rework this age-old formula just enough to create something that is both familiar and yet differs in some key ways from the norm.

This is certainly the case in Luis Leante's 2007 Premio Alfaguara-winning novel, Mira si yo te querré (See if I Will Love You). It is a tale of two young lovers, one fated to become a Barcelona doctor, the other a soldier in Spain's foreign legion during the last years of General Franco's regime in the mid-1970s. Yet Mira si yo te querré is more than just a love story. It is as much a tale of Spain's ill-fated retreat from its Western Sahara colony in 1975 and the invasion and annexation of this nascent country by Morocco.

The story shifts back and forth between the two lovers, Montse Cambra and Santiago San Román, from their initial relationship in the early 1970s (leading to Montse becoming pregnant) and Santiago's embarking for the Western Sahara to Montse's discovery, nearly three decades later, that Santiago did not die in the fighting there, as she had long presumed, but may have somehow survived and had stayed in the region after the Moroccan invasion. Leante shifts back and forth in narrative time, building up Montse and Santiago's original relationship in order to ratchet up the tension leading to her arrival in the occupied region. Questions are raised about how each has or might have changed over the years, all over a backdrop whose own recent, tortured past serves as a counter to any possible tendency toward treacliness.

Leante does a very good job in establishing setting and narrative flow. Things move smoothly from event to event, never feeling forced or underdeveloped. The characterizations, however, are a bit more uneven, perhaps due to Santiago's necessary lengthy absences from the "present" PoVs in order to further Montse's character arc. The concluding scenes, however, more than make up for this relative character underdevelopment, as they serve to reinforce not only what had been developed earlier between the two characters, but also to tie in the Western Sahara conflict with the characters' lives. The result is an entertaining love story that contains more depth than usual for lost lover narratives.

Tales of prodigals, men and women alike, appeal to us not only because some of us reader sympathize with their lack of restraint and their giving in to total hedonism, but also because for some readers, seeing such characters get their comeuppance serves as a justification by proxy of their own decisions to refrain from any indulging of the senses. The story of the "pretty woman," the hooker with the heart of gold, has been told in many guises, but what about a tale of a girl who descends, through spendthrift actions, from the upper middle-class to prostitution and yet who does not see herself as a victim in any real shape or form whatsoever?

It is this latter premise that makes Xavier Velasco's 2003 Premio Alfaguara-winning novel, Diablo Guardián, such an intriguing story. It traces the life of a fifteen year-old girl, who now goes by the pseudonym of Violetta, from the time she stole $100,000 from her parents (who in turn had embezzled that money from fraudulent Red Cross transactions) to her flight to New York and her subsequent blowing of that money over the course of lavish parties and blow until she turns to hotel "encounters" in order to maintain even a semblance of her party life. Accompanying her in her descent into hedonistic excess is a frustrated, egotistical writer known as "Pig," who watches, somewhat helplessly, as he finds himself following along with this girl with whom he has developed some feelings. All the while, there is this vague sense of a metaphorical Mephistopheles, a guardian devil of sorts, guiding and sheltering Violetta.

If this premise alone does not sound enticing, Velasco manages to imbue the narrative with an almost effortless vibrancy. Although it is difficult to claim that Velasco is an accomplished stylist (if anything, the prose has a roughness to it that somehow manages to fit the story being told), the narrative certainly has a casualness to it that dovetails nicely with the tale of excess and (mostly) unrepentant attitude toward misfortunes. The characters of Violetta and Pig are well-rendered and their plights feel real and not overly contrived.

However, there are a few weaknesses. At times, the narrative gets bogged down in detailing the minutiae of Violetta's extravagant lifestyle. This in turn led to a loss of narrative impact for much of the novel's middle portions. The final scenes, however, manage to recapture much of the novel's earlier energy. Although the conclusion is a bit surprising in some regards, for the most part it ties together the narrative nicely. Diablo Guardián might not be a technically perfect novel, but even despite its warts and all, it is one of the more original and powerfully told stories to win the Premio Alfaguara.

I read 18 books this year that were published in a language other than English. The majority of these were nominated for prestigious national awards such as the Premio Strega, Premio Alfaguara, Prix Médicis, and the Prix Goncourt. Others were SF anthologies published in Spanish and Portuguese. Overall, it was a very strong group of books read and while only five are listed below, the others are not far behind in terms of quality.

Winner of the 2014 Prix Goncourt, this novel mixes personal recollection of the author's mother's experiences during the Spanish Civil War with the change in French writer George Bernanos's views on the war to create a powerful story of loss and suffering in the midst of a cruel and devastating war.

I read 22 short story collections and anthologies that were published in the US in 2014. Since I only read 6 anthologies and didn't want to do a truncated section with them (as well as there being five stronger single author collections to fill out a Top 5 list), I thought I would note here that there won't be any anthologies on this year's list. I decided to go with only a Top 5 for this category as this happens to be the number of collections that appear on my overall Top 50 for 2014 list. But enough gabbing, here's the list:

Saturday, December 27, 2014

For the rest of the year, I'm going to release in groups of ten my Top 50 releases of 2014 that I read. It was tough to reduce 165 reads down to 50 (a great many of these books have been featured on several prominent Best of Year lists), but these works should be of interest to most, if not all, readers.

I only read twelve 2014 releases that were translations from other languages. Some of these were published prior to 2014 in the UK, but since I am an American citizen, I'll go by US release dates here. It was tough choosing which books to list here, in part because out of the thirteen read, nine were selected for my overall Top 50. So I'm going to make this a Top 10 list, including one book that almost made the cut for the Top 50 of 2014:

Finally released in translation in the US, this 1949 novella by one of Israel's founding fighters/politicians is one of the most harrowing and damning accounts of the eviction of the Palestinians following the 1948-1949 war that established the state of Israel.

In prose, poetry, and play genres, Grossman explores the loss of his son during one of the rocket attacks in northern Israel during the 2006 mini-conflict with Hezbollah. Powerful, sad, and so much more.

Friday, December 26, 2014

What better way to kick off covering the year that was (and for a few days, still is) than by listing those few 2014 releases that left me either disappointed or just were that bad? I tend to vet the books I choose to read/review, so there's a lot of mediocre to poor works that are eliminated from consideration before I purchase and/or read them. Yet some I have some hopes for, only to see them crushed by the stories turning out to be either deeply flawed or just were downright tedious to read. Then there are the "special" books, the ones that I know will be mediocre or even downright putrid, that I read/review just to keep in the practice of reviewing in a certain fashion.

But I'm blabbing (as usual?) a bit too much, so here are six works that either were disappointing or just plain awful (links to original reviews):

I expected much more from the writer of Cloud Atlas than a disjointed narrative that was much less than the sum of its parts. It's not horrid, but it certainly was his weakest, most flawed narrative in quite some time.

I mostly enjoyed Sarah Monette's Mélusine series, but this new fantasy just did not work for me. The narrative just felt too bland, lacking in some je ne sais qua quality that would have raised it above being just another average fantasy narrative.

No, I'll resist making the obvious pun. However, lately Sanderson's prose and narrative constructing skills have declined from slightly above pedestrian to something that is barely able to keep me reading anything he's written. So yeah, it's mildly disappointed, combined with being decidedly bloated. Not a good combination.

While I have never thought all that highly of Hurley's prose (a good stylist she is not nor has ever claimed to be), I did have some hopes that the narrative at least would be coherent or at least attention-absorbing. It was neither. The inchoate mess of the first quarter, while alleviated somewhat later on, just made this novel too structurally flawed for it to be anything other than a huge disappointment.

If #FirstWorldProblems wrote a post-apocalyptic novel, it likely would resemble California in many of its thematic concerns. Such a shallow, vapid, vaguely white ethnocentric novel that barely can maintain any semblance of structure or plausibility under the weight of the bullshit presented over the course of the narrative. If it weren't for the truly "special" prose and narrative of #1, this would have been by far the worst 2014 novel I've read/reviewed this year.

I had to put one of my Serbian reading squirrels into reading rehab due to this dreck. I didn't expect Goodkind, crappy as he is, to be able to put out something that would make Robert Stanek's self-published works read like Flaubert, but with Severed Souls, he managed to outdo himself and create one of the worst fictions ever published by a large publishing firm in the 21st century. Quite an impressive accomplishment, actually.

Thursday, December 25, 2014

Although there were times that I wasn't for sure if I would be able to do it, I've finally managed to write something about each of the 165 books listed on this 2014 releases post. Although these will be barely 100-150 words in comparison to the 750-1200 word reviews I typically write, I believe they will represent in full my reactions to these works. Now onto the capsule reviews, presented in a rough chronological release order, starting with August (1), September (1), then October (3), November (3), and December (1):

Lydie Salvayre, Pas pleurer (winner of the 2014 Prix Goncourt)

This was the last 2014 release that I read. Pas pleurer by all rights should not have succeeded as well as it did, as it combines two vastly different narratives, a personal account of a daughter putting into print what her mother experienced during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 along with a third-person description of French writer/politician George Bernanos' evolution of thought regarding the conflict. Salvayre does an outstanding job in mixing the two together, as scenes described by the mother dovetail nicely into the horrors that Bernanos experiences when he visits Majorca soon after Franco's forces have taken control of the island. The prose is exquisite and the characterizations are very well done. This is a fairly original way of melding a slight fictionalization of a family history with a psychological portrait of a famous writer and his crisis of thought as he comes to see Franco, whose side he initially championed, for a sort of monster. Well deserving of the literary accolades it has already received, including France's most prestigious literary prize.

Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

This was my first introduction to Bennett's work, but I highly doubt it will be my last. Although it took awhile for the narrative to move into high gear, considering the amount of time Bennett devoted to establishing the backdrop for this secondary world fantasy, by novel's end, there was an interesting mystery plot that had unfolded better than I had anticipated. The sometimes uneven narrative developments of the first half were smoothed out by later revelations, making for a surprisingly enjoyable conclusion. I am curious to see where Bennett goes from here, as there are enough positive elements (in particular, the purposeful avoidance of anything that might be construed as an analogue for Western European medieval mores or culture) in this novel to allow me to forgive the author for the unevenness of the opening chapters.

Keith Donohue, The Boy Who Drew Monsters

The Boy Who Drew Monsters is one of the best literary horror novels that I have read in quite some time. Featuring a ten year-old boy with high-functioning autism who steadily withdraws from the outside "real" world in order to create disturbingly creative monsters that appear to populate the local environs as the novel progresses, the novel strikes a near-perfect balance between creating psychological tension (just how real are these monsters?) and fantastical effect. Donohue is a superb writer and each element feels carefully crafted to achieve the maximum narrative effect. The concluding chapter is perhaps one of the more profound and chilling plot twists that I've read in a while. The Boy Who Drew Monsters is the sort of novel that I could gift to people who rarely read either horror or literary fiction, as there are enough strong elements of both to facilitate a quicker, more complete understanding of just what Donohue manages to accomplish here with aplomb.

Nuruddin Farah, Hiding in Plain Slight

Farah has long been rumored as a potential Nobel Prize candidate and there are certainly some weighty themes explored in his latest novel: dealing with the aftermath of a terrorist attack; internal struggle of a young female professional/ex-pat Somali who suddenly finds herself dealing with her dead brother's adolescent children; confronting "difficult" relatives; homosexuality in East African societies; and balancing career against personal desires. Each of these could make for an intriguing novel and for the most part, Farah manages to juggle these themes while making it seem as though it were effortless. Yet there are times where the prose or dialogue fails to capture the potential full power of certain scenes, thus reducing the novel at times to a display of restraint at the expense of explosive yet vital narrative and character development. Hiding in Plain Sight is far from a poor effort, yet its occasional failure to go beyond the constraints of the characters and scene situations make it feel as though Farah pulled a few of his punches.

David Nicholls, Us (longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize)

This is the story of a slowly failing marriage, seen mostly through the perspective of the husband. There are no sudden downturns or bitter conflicts. Instead, what Nicholls presents is a gentle descent into estrangement, as personal differences, long buried under the bonds of common interests and affection, slowly rise to the top. At first, it is not apparent that Nicholls is indeed describing a failing marriage, as it feels more like any of the usual marriages after a long period of familiarity. It is only in the latter half of the novel that these long-simmering disputes begin bubbling over. Us is a smartly constructed novel, utilizing its dozens of short chapters detailing individual scenes to great effect. The prose, while not sparkling, is certainly fitting for the narrative and the characterizations, warts and all, are well-developed. It is not the "sexiest" of narratives, yet it is one that achieves virtually all of its objectives.

Denis Johnson, The Laughing Monsters

Like a Resident Evil zombie that has been plugged several times and yet somehow still manages to rise again, colonialism is undead and not so well in Johnson's latest novel. Following three ex-pat characters as they travel across the African continent, The Laughing Monsters contains some brilliant lines. Yet despite Johnson's talents as a prose writer, The Laughing Monsters does not feel as substantive as many of his earlier works. Perhaps it is the problematic subject matter (it is hard to tell a story of European-descended people in Africa without there being some sort of exoticism on display, it seems) or perhaps it is simply that the narrative as a whole is just not as developed as it could have been. Regardless of what the primary cause might be, The Laughing Monsters is a mild disappointment, as readers of his previous works likely will expect great things and anything less, such as this good but flawed novel, will be a letdown.

Ron Rash, Something Rich and Strange

This is a collection of thirty-four of Rash's best stories, mostly taken from previous collections. These tales, mostly set in rural Southern Appalachia, focus on the lives of drifters, addicts, and those who seem adrift from the mainstream of contemporary American live. Rash's characters feel like people I've known most of my life; they are that true to Southern life. His stories vary in style and theme, yet there is a common focus on the lives that these characters have chosen (or in some cases, had chosen for them after a bender or tweaking experience). It is hard to pick out a singular story, as there were so many that I enjoyed. Something Rich and Strange serves as an excellent primer to the works of one of the best Southern writers telling tales today.

Paul Theroux, Mr. Bones

This collection of twenty stories touches upon violence and how that shapes and reshapes American culture. Theroux particularly seems interested in exploring conceptualizations of beauty and how increasingly outdated views of what constitutes "masculinity" may be the impetus for acts of desperation, if not outright violence toward self or others. He is a very talented writer and his characters are vividly drawn. Some of the tales might be unsettling to read, but I suspect that is precisely the point, to make the reader react strongly to the questions he is exploring within his tales. Although some stories are slighter in content or are not as well-polished as others, on the whole Mr. Bones is another fine effort from one of the more well-known American short story writers of the past half-century.

This translation of a 1949 Israeli novella that deals with the clearing of a Palestinian village in the immediate aftermath of the 1948-1949 war that created the state of Israel is perhaps one of the more harrowing stories that I've read this year. The narrative follows the lives of a handful of young Israelis sent to a hilltop to await orders. They want action, violent action even. Yet what transpires against a vividly-described backdrop, is one of the more heartwrenching scenes written in the past century. The language itself serves to illustrate the dualities of Israeli-Jewish identity and how the very experiences of the Holocaust are turned upon their heads as the exiles become the exilers, the eternally dispossessed dispossess villagers who had lived on that historical land for millennia. The US English publication is long overdue, as this should have been part of the decades-old dialogue over the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Only a week to go in 2014 and it looks like I will indeed manage to achieve most, if not all, of my 2014 reading/reviewing goals. I'll be starting the Best of 2014 posts in earnest shortly, but for those who are curious about what I'll be covering this year, here's a brief schedule:

25th - Capsule reviews of the final 8 2014 releases read (will be written after Midnight Mass, so up in 4 hours or so?)

26th - Best of 2014: Worst/Most Disappointing Releases (5 books)

27th - Best of 2014: Translated Fictions
Best of 2014: Top 50: 41-50

28th - Best of 2014: Collections/Anthologies
Best of 2014: Top 50: 31-40

29th - Best of 2014: Non-Anglophone Books
Best of 2014: Top 50: 21-30

30th - Best of 2014: Debuts
Best of 2014: Top 50: 11-20

31st - Best of 2014: Top 50: 1-10

Hope this year's edition of the Best of Year posts will be of interest to you, even for those of you who are not squirrelists.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Hard to believe, but before the week is over, I will have written something about every single 2014 release that I have listed here. Unfortunately, I haven't had much energy for reviewing at length, reserving that for finishing out the Premio Alfaguara winners (still have three more to write over the next eight days), so here are ten paragraph-length capsule reviews of books that I finished earlier this year. It's an eclectic book, from a story of an anarchist society to reality TV/sex tape satire and all parts in-between. Now for the brief thoughts on these diverse works:

Margaret Killjoy, A Country of Ghosts

Lately, there have been too many dystopian novels for my taste. Therefore, it was refreshing to learn of a narrative about an anarchist utopia set in a different world under attack from imperialist forces. Although there were a few times that I had some mild disagreements with Killjoy's presentation of anarchist principles (then again, I'm more sympathetic to syndicalism, which does shape my attitudes somewhat), for the most part I found his treatment of his characters and their plights to be well-developed, with a good narrative flow to help maintain a nice tension throughout the novel. Although the prose was relatively weak in comparison to thematic and character development, it was only a minor hiccup in what was otherwise an enjoyable novel.

Christopher Beha, Arts & Entertainments

I should have hated this novel. It focuses on two recent pop culture developments, "reality" TV and "leaked" sex tapes, that really are passé to me. Yet, somehow, Arts & Entertainments ended up being an engrossing read. Perhaps it is because Beha manages, through the complex character of "Handsome" Eddie Hartley, simultaneously to explore just why people are drawn into whoring themselves out for fame and (unlikely) fortune while satirizing the industry that in turn exploits and manipulates both participants and audience alike. The scenes are sometimes too much to believe, yet ultimately by novel's end, there is something of substance to be found lurking beneath the rather putrid excrement of such pop trash. It certainly had a far greater depth of character and theme than I was prepared for after reading plot descriptions.

Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

This tale of a 36 year-old man who, at the prompting of a woman he encounters, embarks upon a redemptive pilgrimage of sorts to find out just why four high school friends of his suddenly abandoned him in college is one of the shorter, more taut Murakami novels that I've read. There are enough several oddities and fantastical elements in here to satiate those who expect such from Murakami, but this was a darker, more reflective tale, one in which the personal quest reveals several tragedies as well as moments of reconciliation. When I finished reading it back in August, I was uncertain what to make of this novel, as it absorbed my thoughts while reading it, yet when I finished it, I did not have a firm concept of what I thought about how well or poorly Murakami executed his themes on friendship and the ties that can unbind. Four months later, I still am uncertain if he wrote one of his better works or if this latest novel is one of his more muted yet spectacular failures. It certainly seems to be the sort of novel which morphs upon a re-reading.

Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

Thomas's debut novel is purportedly an Irish-American multi-generational family history, but the story centers around Eileen Tumulty (later, Leary) and her complex, sometimes fractious relationship with her husband Ed. Their battles and love, seen over the course of the mid-20th century, take on surprising new forms as Ed becomes afflicted with Alzheimer's. Thomas shows a deft hand in constructing Eileen and Ed's lives, as their different world-views and personalities are developed superbly. The reader is given a vivid yet complex mosaic of their lives and by the time the novel concludes, there is not as much a sense of disappointment or tragedy as there is of witnessing two lives well-lived, each following, more or less, his or her heart's desires. We Are Not Ourselves is one of the best debut novels I've read this year.

Nina Allan, The Race

A confession: I do not really know what to make of Allan's first novel-length work. It is more a mosaic than a unified novel, in which elements of four separate novellas merge in interesting fashions and shape reader understandings of what transpired in an earlier section. This can make for some interesting textual interplay, but at times, especially when this particular reader read this only once, it can be trying to recall just precisely how each section connects to the others. There are certainly elements of SF and murder/mystery in here, along with what might be meta-commentaries on these genres. But there seems to be both something lurking in the depths and something missing that would tie these disparate elements together even more tautly. The Race is one of the more intriguing debut efforts that I have read this year, but I am not certain if it isn't also one of the more fundamentally flawed in terms of its overall execution.

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks(longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize)

Despite being longlisted for the Booker Prize, The Bone Clocks might be one of Mitchell's weaker books in terms of structure and plot development. Divided into several sections, reminiscent of his most famous work, Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks suffers whenever the focus shifts to its more supernatural storyline. Although Mitchell is clever in re-introducing several characters from his earlier novels, he fails more often then not in crafting a cohesive meta-narrative. The section detailing the battle between opposing supernatural "guardian"/"occult society" forces felt clichéd and hackneyed, dampening the narrative energy for most of the second half of the novel. Although there were some bright moments throughout the narrative, on the whole, The Bone Clocks felt disjointed. Certainly one of Mitchell's least successful narrative offerings.

Hilary Mantel, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

I greatly enjoyed Mantel's two most recent historical novels on Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII (both won Booker Prizes), but I was uncertain as to whether or not the richness of setting and characterization would translate well to the short story milieu. For the most part, Mantel does an outstanding job constructing her stories, as each tale feels different in tone and setting from the others, yet there is a uniform quality of characterization and prose to each of them. Although there were a couple of stories that felt slighter than the others, this is perhaps as much a matter of reader preference as anything else. Mantel is certainly one of the better stylists writing today and this is on full display in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van (longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction)

Darnielle is more famous for his work as the singer/songwriter for The Mountain Goats, but here in his debut novel, Wolf in White Van, he manages to parley his talents as a songwriter into the longer novel medium. It is a deceptive novel, one that lays out its central premise within its opening pages, only to revisit and rework that premise in subsequent chapters. It is a combination of a live-action role-playing game and something darker, something that lurks within the recesses of the Trace Italian game designer's mind. As the novel progresses, the setting deepens, with some surprising twists and turns. Darnielle is a very talented writer, and several scenes are effective in part due to how well he constructs and narrates them. Although the ending was relatively weaker than preceding sections, Wolf in White Van was one of the more entertaining debut novels that I've read this year.

Ben Lerner, 10:04

The success, or failure, of Lerner's second novel, 10:04, depends upon how readily the reader is willing to separate quasi-fact from fiction. Like his previous novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, there is a semi-direct authorial stand-in present in the main character. At times, this perceived semi-factual viewpoint adds a sense of veracity to the narrative, but at other times, the artifice is too self-conscious, leaving a slightly disagreeable aftertaste of navel gazing. This is a shame, as Lerner is a talented writer, able to say more with a few pithy sentences than what many authors manage to achieve with pages of description or dialogue. The premise of 10:04 was interesting for the most part, but Lerner's penchant for self-reflection weakens the narrative's flow at some of the story's more crucial points. Certainly one of the more mixed reactions that I had to any 2014 release read this year.

Jay Lake, Last Plane to Heaven

Lake's stories, both novel-length and short fiction alike, have been a mixed bag for me. Often, he would create a vivid setting peopled with some interesting characters, only for there to be something about the story's structure or its prose (or vice versa) that would hinder my enjoyment of the unfolding story. In his last, posthumous collection, Last Plane to Heaven, there are a wealth of diverse tales that are a testament to his creativity. However, there are some several clunkers that just do not feel as well-realized as his more successful tales. At times, it was hard to believe that the same writer penned these tales, as the quality, not to mention the tone and presentation, varied so much from story to story. Yet there are enough good tales to justify giving this collection a chance. Just do not be surprised if there are several tales that will do nothing for you.

Monday, December 22, 2014

I have reviewed more current foreign language works this year (17; not counting pre-2014 releases) than I have in any previous year. These works, published in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian, have included some nominees and winners for major literary awards (Premio Alfaguara, Premio Strega, Prix Médicis). In the next few days, I'll list my favorites for the year. But for now, here are capsule reviews of the final four 2014 releases that I read in French, Spanish, and Portuguese:

In her latest novel, Montalbetti continues exploring facets of American life that she conducted in earlier novels such as Western. Here, the setting is the West Coast and as the title suggests (Nothing More than the Waves and Wind), the locale plays a substantial role in shaping the narrative. Montalbetti's prose is evocative and the narrative sustains a steady flow throughout. While the characters at times take a backseat to the scenes in which they operate, for the most part the characterizations are well-realized as well. Plus rien que les vagues et le vent was one of the longlisted titles that I had hopes for selection for the finalist round of the Prix Médicis and it certainly is one of the better French-language novels that I have read this year.

Valérie Zenatti, Jacob, Jacob(finalist for the 2014 Prix Médicis)

Set in French Algeria during World War II, Jacob, Jacob is the story of an Algerian Jew, Constantine, who is called to fight for his country in advance of the 1944 invasion of Provence. It is a short, sharp tale of an innocent who will be forced to confront the terrible realities of a war in which ideologies play a role in shaping an understanding just what the stakes are. Zenatti does an outstanding job in establishing her characters and the effects that the war will have on them. Her prose is exquisite, eloquent without ever descending into maudlin melodrama. The plot flows smoothly from beginning to end, with no longeurs. Jacob, Jacob was one of my favorite non-English-language reads this year. Hopefully, there will be an English translation of this excellent work in the years to come.

This second volume in the Brazilian steampunk anthology series Vaporpunk contains nine stories that explore various elements of Brazilian and world cultures in relation to the notion of replacing current technological developments with those derived from an alternate, steam-based technology. I enjoyed the majority of these stories, finding them to be inventive looks at our own contemporary societies and how certain historical developments shape our understandings of the world around us. My only quibble about this otherwise very good anthology is that it's shorter than I expected, with only nine (albeit for the most part good) tales. Despite this, this second volume manages to sustain the energy and momentum established in the first volume.

Mariano Villarreal (ed.), Terra Nova 3

This third installment in the Spanish SF anthology series perhaps may be the best in a series that has already garnered some of Spain's most prestigious SF awards. Like the previous two volumes, Terra Nova 3 mixes in Spanish originals with translations. This time, however, instead of the foreign stories being from Anglophone countries, there is a direct translation from Chinese to Spanish of a story by Cixin Liu, which happens to be one of the strongest stories in an anthology full of interesting takes on SF issues. At nearly 350 pages on my iPad, Terra Nova 3 is one of the larger foreign language anthologies I've read this year and it is among the best. My only complaint is that there could have been even more Spanish-language originals, as I am curious about SF being produced in Hispanophone countries, but this is a minor complaint in what was otherwise a very enjoyable anthology.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

I am unlikely to ever pay any money to be any sort of WorldCon member, but for those who are more interested in such things and who might be curious to see what sorts of works I would nominate for the fiction categories, below is a list of works published by non-genre-specific publishers of authors whose stories, both novels and shorter fiction alike, would be considered for such a hypothetical Hugo ballot. I am also writing this in case there are those who are going to be nominating works in the next couple of months and who might be wanting to seek out recommended books so that their own ballots might contain as many diverse and wonderful books as possible.

Novel:

In most cases, I've already written reviews, so I'll just link to those:

Yes, I know that if this were a real ballot, I would have had to list a Top 5 (something I will not do now, as I would like to maintain some suspense for when I reveal my Top 50 for 2014 over the course of the next 10 days). But these are some of the best speculative fiction that I've read this year (very few works published by genre imprints would have been considered, but maybe that's a post for another time?) and for those looking for some great stories, I believe these will please the majority of you. The short fiction categories (collections, unless otherwise noted) contain several really good stories, too many to list here (if I had, the list of noteworthy spec fic stories would have easily exceeded 50).

Hopefully, there will be something for some to consider as they try to make out their Hugo nomination ballots in the coming months. I certainly hope my lists provide something different and not more of the same for those readers who do want to see just what is being published out there beyond the familiar confines of genre publishing.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

2014 has seen the release of some outstanding works by women writers. Over 40% (granted, this is lower than the percentage published this year) of the 2014 releases I've read this year have been by women and by far, the majority of those releases have been at least well-written and entertaining. If it weren't due for a time/energy crunch these past couple of months, I would have devoted much more space to extolling the virtues of the five works I am about to cover. Two were considered for the National Book Award for Fiction; two are debuts; and two are short story collections (one a debut). Each is deserving of a greater readership. Now onto brief discussions of why I enjoyed these works:

Julia Elliott, The Wilds

Elliott's debut is one of the strongest, most thematically connected collections that I have read in quite some time. Over the course of eleven stories, each of which contains an excellent mixture of humor, bizarreness, and in-depth exploration of facets of human character and motivation, Elliott confronts readers with topics (such as how we treat the outcasts and less fortunates) that we perhaps might not rather want to consider. Her use of surreal settings to make the "invisible" more visible is realized almost perfectly in these stories. Her writing is impeccable, as there is a deceiving sense of effortlessness to her storytelling. Every element, from the prose to characterization to narrative/plot flow, fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. The Wilds is one of, if not the absolute best, the strongest collections released this year in a 2014 full of excellent short story collections. It is one of those books that lovers of both speculative and realist fiction could gift to fans of the other and claim it is one of the best examples of that literary genre released in recent years.

Jac Jemc, A Different Bed Every Time

"Every night I stunned myself with gin. On one date, a man and I ended up at the airport and ate rhinestones. We moved fast and real." This opening to the first story, "A Violence," sets the tone for the remainder of Jemc's latest collection. She takes no prisoners. The stories are sharp, embedded with unusual imagery and with prose that can be unfamiliar to readers more accustomed to more straightforward narratives. But once the reader gets acclimated to how Jemc narrates her stories, the vistas open up and several remarkable moments occur over the course of these 42 short stories, the majority of which are flash fictions under 5 pages long. The cumulative effect is greater than the sum of each of these short fictions, making A Different Bed Every Time a strong, wonderful collection to read for those who enjoy startling, impression-filled stories.

Jane Smiley, Some Luck (longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award)

Some Luck is the beginning to a trilogy that plans to cover 100 years of an Iowa family over the course of 100 chapters. It certainly is a promising beginning, as Smiley fills these early decades of the 20th century with characters that reflect the reality of those times: recent immigrants, suffering from xenophobia due to World War I; the radicalization of some rural families due to the then-popular socialism of first Eugene V. Debs and later Lenin and Trotsky; uncertain economic times due to collapsing food prices during the 1920s; and questions of whether or not "progress" is a noble ideal or a masque for something more nefarious. Her characters do not parrot these historical realities as much as they live them; each feels like a dynamic, well-realized individual. By novel's end, I was left wanting to read more, curious to see how the middle decades of the 20th century will treat the Langdon family.

Marilynne Robinson, Lila (finalist for the 2014 National Book Award)

There must be something powerful about having Iowa as a setting, as along with Smiley's book, Robinson's narrative set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa was also nominated for a 2014 National Book Award. The third in a trilogy of books set there, Lila was more of a struggle for me to read. Not because the narrative is dull (it is not) nor because of bad prose or poor characterizations (the opposite, in fact), but mostly due to me reading this without reading the first two novels. Yet even after realizing that there were a number of references to other characters whose import I would not understand due to not having read those books, Lila was still a very engaging work, as this hither-to young wife to the other two books' main protagonist proves to be an intriguing, challenging character to consider. Sometime in the near future, I plan on seeking out the first two books and then re-reading Lila, as I think when placed within a larger context, it might be one of the better historical/family series to be released in recent years.

Jennifer Marie Brissett, Elysium

When I finished reading Elysium a couple of weeks ago, my first thought was, "This was a debut?" It certainly is a daring first effort, as Brissett tackles issues of gender/sex identities and love through the interactions of two souls, Adrianne/Adrian and Antoine/Antoinette, over the course of several "lives," each of which are seen only as vignettes interrupted by seeming computer code/rebooting. In each of these iterations, these characters struggle to forge identities and bonds even as their bodies shift and they find themselves in new situations. In some ways, it is a struggle toward nirvana, although it is never couched in those terms during the narrative. By the novel's end, the cumulative lessons that these two souls (or perhaps computer simulacra?) have learned makes Elysium one of the best debut novels that I've read in a year full of strong first novels and collections.

Friday, December 19, 2014

I believe I have said before that I am far from the target audience for action/adventure movies. I am generally not impressed with CGI "special effects" and explosions and large, crashing sounds tend to bore me with their redundant repetition. Dialogue and good acting are worth much more than their weight in gold (mithril?).

Therefore, it was with some trepidation that I went to watch the final The Hobbit movie yesterday with my dad and middle brother. I had seen each of the previous five Peter Jackson adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth tales and found each successive movie to be worse than the one before it. I am not a "purist"; I understand and accept that literature and cinema are two fundamentally different art forms and that elements which work for one would be disastrous if imposed upon the other. Yet this does not excuse the filmmaker from constructing a narrative that fails to remain true to its own internal logic.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies opens immediately with the cliffhanger scene from The Desolation of Smaug. There is no brief synopsis montage to ease the viewer back into the narrative. Instead, it is a straight plunge into carnage. Yet this opening fifteen minutes feels disjointed, as it shows just how ridiculous it was to have some of the dwarves to remain in Lake Town, as they don't really even serve as witnesses; this delay/detour was unnecessary and it serves as one of many examples of questionable narrative choices by Jackson and his scriptwriters.

Then there is the closing of the Gandalf/Necromancer subplot. While obviously there could be no "final battle" due to The Lord of the Rings, the scenes at Dol Guldur felt extraneous. Outside of the cool visual of the White Council fighting the Necromancer's minions (including the Ringwraiths), the entire episode barely lasted five minutes. This revelation of what Gandalf was doing, while filling in a gap left by Tolkien not divulging in the novel how exactly Gandalf occupied himself during the time Bilbo and the dwarves traveled through Mirkwood and to Erebor, failed to add anything to the narrative. If any thing, it detracted from the overall narrative arc.

After a few heartwarming scenes of the Lake Town citizens recovering on the Long Lake's shores and a couple of silly scenes involving the late Mayor's deputy, the story shifts quickly to war, war, and still more war. While the gathering armies and the pitter-patter between the aggrieved parties was fairly well done and hewed closely to the novel, almost the entire second half of this nearly 150 minute movie was devoted to battle. Although this is to be expected, considering the title and all, it felt disjointed. There were CGI mass battle scenes, individual duels, and elves frolicking about hither and yon, but it never really felt coherent. The backstories of the various armies collapsed during the middle of the fighting, as one group or another would disappear for long stretches with little in the way of narrative explanation.

This lack of coherency is accentuated by some of the weird choices made by Jackson. As if having a rabbit sled wasn't ridiculous enough, we have Thranduil riding on an elk, Dáin Ironfoot on a war pig (and yes, I thought of Black Sabbath when seeing him on it), and even battle rams running up steep mountain slopes with dwarves atop. It was just so stupid to watch, along with Legolas running up crumbling stonework as though he were in a Super Mario game. By the time the movie ended, it just felt as though a few good scenes peppered with fine acting performances (mostly dialogue between Bilbo and Thorin) had been swamped with some of the worst, bloated, pointless CGI sequences ever put into a film genre that its renowned for its devotion to such scenes. The elements that made the novel an enjoyable reading experience for me at twelve were largely absent. In its stead was just a poorly-constructed action/adventure trilogy that had only a patina of Tolkien's narrative to dress up its otherwise mediocre cinematic structure. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is by far the worst of the six Tolkien-related movies that Jackson has produced. Certainly not a movie I ever care to see again in any format.